Building Apollo

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More flexibility with your contact tasks

Tuesday January 26, 2016

Another week, another Apollo update! This time we have a handful of enhancement for tasks on contacts and tasks in general.

New tasks screen in the Contacts section

After updating the Tasks screens in My Tasks and Projects, the one inside the Contacts section was the only being left behind. Compared to the newer ones, it lacked advanced filtering, search, and real time updates.

The new tasks screen brings everything you'd expect: a new header with listing and grouping capabilities, search and task count summary.

An advanced filtering box that allows you to fine-tune the list of tasks and focus on what matters.

And, of course, a way to filter by contact, case or deal, so you can, say, show only tasks for a deal and a related contact.

Filtering by creation or completion date

Speaking of filters, all task overviews now include two new filters: by creation date and by completion date. So you can now show tasks created or completed in a specific date range. You can use the former when in the Active tasks view, and the latter in the Completed tasks view.

Clickable links in task descriptions

This is a feature that has been often requested by our users: you can now create a task with a web address in its extended description and have it automatically converted in a clickable link. Neat!

Disable users, use a retina logo for your company

Monday January 18, 2016

We're back with an Apollo update. This one will let you selectively disable users in your workspace and display a retina logo for your company.

Disable user access

Until now, if you wanted to stop a user from accessing your workspace, your only option was to delete that user entirely. All elements created by them (tasks, messages, comments, etc.) would of course remain untouched in your workspace, but if you changed your mind and wanted that user to re-join by inviting them again, they would be treated as a completely new user.

From today, you can just disable them! They will no longer have access to your workspace, but all their references and settings will remain intact.

This is very useful to temporarily prevent a client to access all projects you shared with them – instead of disabling them one by one. Of course this works for internal users too!

To disable a user, just go to Settings > Internal users or Settings > External users and click Disable user. To re-enable it, click Enable. Disabled users trying to login with their correct credentials will be warned of course, to avoid unnecessary confusion!

Retina support for your company logo

A week ago, this came in from one of our users:

Hi guys,
We noticed that the corporate logo is being resampled to a non-retina version, which makes all of my designers have sad faces. Give them happy faces!

–Michael T.

Hey, we sure didn't want to make designers sad! So from now on you can use retina versions of your logo for both the login and the workspace screens.

What's next

The new overview screen is ready, and it's already available to The Brave Collective (*) for additional feedback: we hope to receive their green signal and release it as soon as next week!

(*) The Brave Collective are those users that get to try the upcoming Apollo features before they're released to everyone. They help shaping the feature, and – of course – they suffer from the occasional newly introduced bug. If you're interested in participating, apply by emailing us to contact@applicomhq.com.

As always, you can find the detailed list of changes in this update below. Thanks for reading!


Enhancements

  • Removed the recipient list from each deal in the deal update notification email when multiple deals were modified.
  • Better value output when exporting the CSV file for completed tasks across all projects.

Bug fixes

  • Calendar wasn't updating the task visibility when a project containing those tasks was archived/unarchived.
  • The calendar in archived projects was showing milestones from the main calendar instead of those in that very project.
  • Opening the task list form for editing, closing it without saving and then adding a new task list prevented the task page from reloading.
  • There was a Javascript error when creating a project from a deal if the Projects section wasn't already loaded.
  • Sometimes, editing the end date of a repeating task didn't work.
  • Weekly events were set to repeat the choosen day AND every thursday.
  • Rare race condition that caused an error in the notification subsystem when a contact couldn't be found.
  • Mobile: you could create a calendar event with the end date BEFORE the start date.
  • Editing a deal while in the deal page broke the ability to change the deal status.
  • Subscriptions to a message weren't being correctly shown in the message detail page.

Keep an eye on your team workload

Monday January 11, 2016

As you may already know, you have the option to add a time estimation to tasks by opening the Details tab of the task form.

While more and more people started taking advantage of it, we were busy adding the workload report screen, and from today you can find it in your Apollo workspace by going to Projects and then clicking the Workload submenu.

This new report is very useful to assess what kind of load is on everyone's shoulders across the board. For each person, you'll find a summary of the number of assigned tasks, their total estimated time – even split between the already completed and still active parts – and the total logged time so far.

You can look at this info to find answers to various questions, for example: is everyone's load well balanced? Or, there's people with too much work assigned which could be moved to other, less busy, team members?

Another example: is the team logging time properly? Why 18 hours' worth of completed tasks only have 4 hours logged on them? Are we particularly bad at making time estimates (OK, we all are!) or there's a lot of time not being actively tracked? (You don't want that!)

The new workload report will help you discover and fix those little holes in your team productivity that you might not have noticed in your daily routine.

Here's to a fantastic 2016 with Apollo

Wednesday January 6, 2016

“Please make sure your seat backs are in their full, upright position and that your tray tables are stored. Flight attendants, prepare for take-off…”

We're sketching down the Apollo development plan for 2016, and we feel like we're in a big plane ready to take off. We're trying to prioritize all the major features we set our mind to, but deciding their order and what to tackle first is no easy task!

Will it be the audit system for tasks? Or custom fields for contacts? Repeating tasks maybe? Or tasks assigned to multiple users? These are only some of the candidates based on your feedback, so keep it coming!

After releasing the new permission system for time tracking last week, this week update is mainly about small fixes and some polish (you'll find some of them in the list below). By the way, this one makes a total of 8 releases in the last 8 weeks!


Enhancements

  • Task CSV export: the estimated time field has been splitted in two fields (decimal hours, and minutes) instead of a single one in seconds.
  • Deal form: added the color bullet for categories and the “plus” icon on the submit button.

Bug fixes

  • Apollo could sometimes hang when trying to invite a new user in a project.
  • Mobile: some item pickers didn't work as expected.
  • Undo-ing a contact import could cause an error under certain conditions.
  • Archiving a project from the project list didn't update the project list cache used workspace-wide.
  • Selecting “I'll restart later” when asked to restart Apollo after a new version was available could cause Apollo to stop working and, well, force you to restart anyway.
  • Some special characters could break the deal form when editing it.
  • The deal update notification email was not showing the exact pricing.
  • The sum of deal values was incorrectly calculated when deals were worth the same.
  • Changing the related contact for a project sometimes caused a Javascript error.
  • Colors weren't visible in the Category selectbox of the contact form AND in the contact list's bulk actions.

New permission system for time tracking

Monday December 28, 2015

We couldn't wait the new year to unveil the new granular permission system for time tracking inside projects, so here we are!

As you may have already read in our previous post, new features are perfected with the help from The Brave Collective, a group of users that get to try them before everybody else, until those features are ready to be released to everyone. This one is no exception!

First of all, let's clarify that nothing changes in your current workflow – the changes are backward compatible. Basically, it's added features and flexibility for you to make use of, if you wish to, otherwise nothing changes in the way Apollo currently works for you.

Extended time tracking permissions

With this new permission model, you have a great amount of flexibility when it comes to deciding who can do what about time tracking in projects. In fact, you can now grant different access levels to time entries to each user, choose if they can or cannot log time, and if they can see the estimated time for each task (turns out, quite a lot of users want to keep this information private on some projects), all on a per-project basis.

Access types are listed in ascending freedom levels; a user can either have no access (cannot see time entries and cannot track time at all), access to his time entries, access to his company's time entries, or access to all time entries (that is, everyone's time entries for the project).

Moreover, this new permission system is available for both internal and external users. That's right: external users can now use time tracking features in your Apollo workspace, including timers!

As already mentioned, the default values for permissions are consistent with the way time tracking worked previously: internal users get unrestricted access to all time entries, while external users get no access at all.

Wrap up

We'd like to thank all users in The Brave Collective; their feedback is very important for us, since it helps shaping the future of Apollo. We have a lot planned for 2016, and we're very excited about it!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays!

Monday December 21, 2015

Best wishes for a season of love, peace and joy!

We are so happy about the way this year turned out for us: we started communicating with you in a consistent way again, and your response has been amazing! We received a lot of feedback and praises for new functionalities, and we are sure you'll love what's cooking for the next months.

Speaking of new releases, also this week we are pushing another Apollo update: this brings us to 6 releases in 6 weeks!

This is mainly a service release (enhancements and fixes) but you'll also find a new Download as CSV button in the My Completed Tasks screen, to help those users that need to submit their completed task lists for the yearly review.

What to expect next week

The signals we're getting from The Brave Collective (*) tell us that we are ready to release the new, much more granular, permission model for time logging and time entries in Apollo. Excited? We bet you are!

(*) The Brave Collective are those users that get to try the new upcoming Apollo features before they are released to everyone. They help shaping the feature, and – of course – they suffer from the occasional newly introduced bug :-) Sounds interesting? Apply by email to contact@applicomhq.com.

Happy Holidays!


New features

  • Ability to get completed tasks in a CSV file.

Enhancements

  • Better draft autosave on writeboard revisions.
  • Clicking the current deal status will now avoid reloading the whole page.

Bug fixes

  • The project's milestone list didn't update when adding a new milestone, if a previous minor error had already occurred.
  • The event detail tooltip was showing the wrong list of participants in recurring events.
  • Adding a yearly repeating event failed when the event start date was in the future.
  • Fixed an issue with a translation key in the event form dialog.
  • The “year(s)” field remained disabled when adding a repeating event with a custom year value. Which, yeah, defeated the purpose of that field. We'd like not to talk about this anymore.
  • Fixed a small problem with the Basecamp Classic XML import procedure.
  • The “Cancel” button in the confirm dialog for undo-ing an Highrise import wasn't working.

Improved project overview screen

Monday December 14, 2015

Today you'll find an improved project overview screen and an addition to the save timer dialog.

New project overview screen

Since releasing the new project list a few months ago which – along with better filtering – gave you a more comprehensive view of your projects, a recurring request started appearing in our inbox: have that additional information right in the project overview.

So today we're fulfilling that popular request: a new project overview screen where you can see the project information at a glance.

Shown here are the due date and how many days are left, total logged time, project progress (based on completed/remaining tasks), client and related deal, and a list of people working on the project; if needed, also the project description and its status (Silent or Archived) will be there.

Custom date when logging time

Do you ever forget to save a timer, only to remember doing it on the following day? And being forced to search for the time entry that you just added, only to change it back to the right date?

That's no longer the case! Now you can select the time entry's date right when logging time from a timer! Easy!

This new feature is available both in the desktop and mobile version of Apollo.

Thanks for reading!

Refreshed deal overview and writeboard archiving

Monday December 7, 2015

This week we'll talk about the deal list refresh, the ability to filter deals by Close date, and the new writeboard archiving feature.

A tweaked deal list

The deal list went through a light redesign: the old three separate views (Pending, Won, Lost) have been unified into a single one, and the ability to filter by status has been added to the Filter panel.

Speaking of filters, you can now also filter deals by Close date. This will help those users who want to focus on how many deals were won or lost in a given period.

Writeboard archiviation

Another small addition that will help those of you with long-running projects is the ability to archive writeboards. Sometimes a writeboard is not relevant anymore but, of course, you don't want to delete it. By archiving it you can keep your list tidy while retaining the ability to retrieve it anytime.

To archive a writeboard just open it, click the gear button, and select Archive. To access archived writeboards, select Archived writeboards from the View dropdown.

Your feedback makes Apollo better

Just a few hours after we rolled out the Subscription to deal updates feature, some of you who started playing with the new toy noticed that the notification email got somewhat noisy when multiple changes to the same deal were made.

To fix this, deals that went through those changes are now mentioned only once in the notification email, which is now sent less frequently than before, at most once every two hours – Guido, Robert, Tania: this is for you 😀.

So keep your feedback coming. Drop us a line at contact@applicomhq.com with your thoughts. Don't be a stranger!

What's next?

While the work to make Deals a stronger feature in Apollo will certainly continue, now we are doing the finishing touches to release a redesigned project overview screen. We are sure you'll love it, so stay tuned.

If you'd like to follow the development of Apollo more closely, keep following this blog, which is also available as an RSS feed.

Thanks for reading!

A better way to follow your deals

Monday November 30, 2015

We're back with another Apollo update, development is moving fast and we have a lot in the pipeline. Here's what you can use today:

Subscribe to deal updates

Last week we added the ability to subscribe to a contact as a whole, in order to stay updated when a new note or comment is added to that contact. This week, we're doing the same for deals, with a twist: you have the ability to choose between two levels of notification.

  • Select Subscribe to deal changes only to receive notifications when the deal record is updated (status, price, etc.).
  • Select Subscribe to deal changes plus notes/comments to also receive a notification when somebody adds a new note or comment.

Again, if you are an admin user, you can also manage other users' subscription by clicking the Manage link.

What's next?

As you may already know, most of the new features comes directly from requests from users (like you!). One recurring request is to improve deal management in general, so expect more updates about deals in the next few weeks.

That's it for today! As always, a big thanks goes to the users who keep sending their feedback. You will find a list of other minor changes at the end of this post.

Thanks for reading!


New features

  • Ability to notify thread subscribers when you edit a comment.
  • Mobile: added ability to create end edit contacts.

Enhancements

  • Timers: Better keyboard handling when editing a description. Esc to cancel, Enter to save.
  • Single task screen: updated the bulk actions header look in the timelogs tab.
  • Added the "created at" column to CSV export in "My Tasks". Meghan R., this is for you!
  • Invitation form: added company pre-selection when inviting an external user. Fewer clicks!
  • Removed the page footer in pages where it was useless (that is, when it was just an empty box).
  • Reply by email charsets different than UTF-8 are now handled better.
  • Mobile: added a better placeholder when the overview is empty.
  • Mobile: tapping a comment from the overview, projects or contacts feed will now scroll to the comment itself.
  • Better draft autosave on project messages.
  • Enhanced the way we truncate html comments for preview purposes.

Bug fixes

  • Calendar: sometimes the end date of a series didn't get saved.
  • Drag & dropping a project task caused a javascript error.
  • Fixed a timezone issue in the “Tasks created yesterday and still unassigned” report.
  • A project created from a deal was not associated to the deal correctly.

Subscribe to contacts, new Help and Support site, and more!

Tuesday November 24, 2015

Today we are releasing another feature that will benefit those of you who work with contacts, we revamped email interactions and we are announcing the brand new Help & Support site.

Subscribe to contacts as a whole

Subscribing to a comment thread for a task on a contact was something Apollo had from the beginning. Today, we are extending this functionality to the whole contact. This means that you can now subscribe to receive updates when a contact gets a new note added, or when somebody adds a comment to a note.

To use it, just open a contact and click Subscribe in the E-mail notification box. If you are an Admin user, you can also manage other users' subscriptions by clicking the Manage link.

Revamped email integration

For this one, we added some useful switches to help you bend the email interactions with Apollo to your will. Email dropbox only for pre-existing contacts (no contact list pollution)? Check! Private note on a contact? Check! Post a silent project message (users will not be notified)? Now you can!

You can read an handy guide about this feature, where you can find all the details.

New support site

We are happy to announce our Help & Support site, where you'll find a growing list of Guides and – of course – our FAQs. It is still on its infancy, but new content will be added each week.

Whether you are a novice Apollo user or an experienced one, we're sure you will find it useful.

And that's it for today! Thanks again to the users who send their feedback and to beta testers!